is remote in time and place, and because in them Flaubert indulges his passion for splendor—­for oriental scenery, for barbaric characters, the pomp of savage war and more savage religion, events strange, terrible, atrocious.  We may call the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity—­for the humdrum existence of the country doctor, the apothecary, the insipid clerk, the vapid sentimental woman, and the charlatans of science.  But as a matter of fact, all his books are essentially constructed on the same theory:  all are just as “realistic” as Flaubert could make them.

Henry James called Madame Bovary a brilliantly successful application of Flaubert’s theory; he pronounced L’Education Sentimentale “elaborately and massively dreary”; and he briefly dismissed Salammbo as an accomplished work of erudition.  Salammbo is indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its archaeological details.  But Madame Bovary is also a work of erudition, and Bouvard and Pecuchet is a work of enormous erudition; a thousand volumes were read for the notes of the first volume and Flaubert is said to have killed himself by the labor of his unfinished investigations.  There is no important distinction to be made between the method or the thoroughness with which he collected his facts in the one case or the other; and the story of the war of the mercenaries against the Carthaginians is evolved with the same alternation of picture and dramatic spectacle and the same hard merciless externality that distinguish the evolution of Emma Bovary’s history.

We may go still farther than that towards wiping out the distinction between Flaubert’s “romantic” and his “realistic” works; and by the same stroke what is illusory in the pretensions of the realists, namely, their aspiration to an “impersonal art.”

If we were seeking to prove that an author can put nothing but himself into his art, we should ask for no more impressive illustions than precisely, Madame Bovary and Salammbo.  These two masterpieces disclose to reflection, no less patently than the works of George Sand, their purpose and their meaning.  And that purpose and meaning are not a whit less personal to Flaubert than the purpose and meaning of Indiana, let us say, are personal to George Sand.  The “meaning” of Madame Bovary and Salammbo is, broadly speaking, Flaubert’s sense of the significance—­or, rather, of the insignificance—­of human life; and the “purpose” of the books is to express it.  The most lyrical of idealists can do no more to reveal herself.

The demonstration afforded by a comparison of Salammbo and Madame Bovary is particularly striking because the subject-matters are superficially so unlike.  But take any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from Salammbo:  take the passing of the children through the fire to Moloch, or the description of the leprous Hanno, or the physical surrender of the priestess to her country’s enemy, or the following picture of the crucified lion: